Matt Kettler wrote: > > Your swap used should never be more than mem free if you can > avoid it. >
Note: by "mem free" I mean total "free" memory.. i.e.: mem free + buffers + cache. It's quite normal for just the "free" memory number to be low. Most OS's will turn free memory into a really big disk cache if they can, but they'll readily turn this back into memory for processes when needed. In your example, you've got 37024k of "total" free memory, even though there's only 1848k that's truly not being used at all. However, 1335848k of swap is being used, which is more than 3 times as much as your total free memory.. That's not good, and likely indicates you'll be grinding your disk quite heavily as processes thrash in and out of the swap.
